I know what you're thinking. Okay, actually I don't. Either you're already a fan of Hip-Hop, and you saw the title and thought you'd give it a read to see whether or not you agree with me, or you're not a fan of Hip-Hop at all, in which case you probably thought something along the lines of “Kids these days rabble rabble rabble” and went on to read something else before getting this far. So why, do you ask, am I writing this article at all, when its target audience won't even really want to read it?
I don't really have an answer to that question. Stop asking such hard questions! What is this, the Spanish Inquisition?
Look, really I'm hoping for the off chance that someone will think “Hey, let's see what he has to say. Maybe he can make a reasoned argument that will change my mind!” for the first time in the history of the internet, ever. Yes, I'm counting on the one-in-a-million chance that someone on the internet will lend me credibility which I by no means deserve.
Nonetheless, here I am ready to engage this sisyphean labor, and I promise you, those of the target audience that made it this far, I am doing it for your own good. For those of you who already like Hip-Hop and are reading, congratulations on joining the rest of everybody in reading something that you know only reaffirms your already held and probably unjustified beliefs. Well, let's get started.
Step One: Turn Off the Fucking Radio
People complain about rap music. A lot. Like, all the time. They say/blog/twit/Facebook “It's degrading to women!” or “It's so repetitive!” or “It glorifies violence!” or “It's just inane, materialistic macho bullshit!” And I felt the exact same way all through my high school years. I'd ride the bus, the other kids singing along to Ludacris' “What's Your Fantasy,” and I wanted nothing more at that moment than to ki-ki-ki-ki-kick Luda in the ba-ba-ba-balls.
I was a Rock 'n' Roll kid. I grew up listening to Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, because that's what my older brothers listened to, and it kicked epic amounts of ass. So I was into Rock, and I knew it.
But was I into Johnny Cash, Slayer, Led Zeppelin, Death Cab for Cutie, or Coldplay? Certainly I wasn't into all of them, am still not into some of them and probably never will be. Because there are a lot of different things that fall into the “Rock” genre, some of which I liked, some of which I didn't care for, and some of which made me want to remove my ears and stretch them out into a noose with which to hang the lead singer of Dashboard Confessional.
(Okay, I admit to liking that one Dashboard Confessional song when I was 14 years old. So did you. You know the one. Shut up. Just shut up.)
The point is that “Rock” can mean a lot of different things, and if you knew what you were looking for, you could find really good rock, and if you didn't, you were stuck listening to soulless commercial garbage. And there's honestly a huge market for soulless commercial garbage; that's the “commercial” part. Some people in the music industry treat it as just that, an industry, but that doesn't mean there aren't people out there who still believe music to be an art and they go about making it with that in mind. The same is true for Hip-Hop: Nicki Minaj and the bulk of things put out by Lil Wayne (everything The Carter III and after) are objectively piles of shit pinched out into a microphone and mass produced to ensure that the bulk of the population remains blissfully moronic. But if you think that all of a kind of music is just like the stuff that you hear on the radio or in bars and clubs, then you are totally, dreadfully wrong. How would you feel if I refused to listen to any Rock 'n' Roll because Miley Cyrus happens to whine over a guitar and drums, or because Jimmy Buffet employs the 12-bar blues structure? Exactly. You'd feel like I was being dismissive towards a rich and nuanced art form based on an unfair generalization.
Turn off the radio. Seriously. The radio is for idiots who need to be told what music to like, and if you don't like it, it means you're not an idiot. Good for you.
Step Two: Learn (Some of) the History
It would have been too easy to name this entry anything involving the word “roots,” and if you don't know why that would have been an awful, horrible thing, well, then I don't know. There are these people, they're called black people. They used to be called African Americans, until people realized how ludicrous (not Ludacris) it was once people kept slipping and calling Nelson Mandela an African American and Charlize Theron became a naturalized American citizen after being born in South Africa. Yeah, we've been dumbasses about race since pretty much ever.
Point is, there's these black people, see, and there's this thing called institutional racism that totally sucks and shit, and made (makes) life more difficult for them then it should have been (should be). Progress has been made from the Sammy Davis, Jr. “sidekick” days, certainly, but anyway, things hit a real low in the 1980's. Blah blah Reaganomics blah blah crack blah CIA blah blah—look, read a book, okay? Point is, with great suffering, an outpouring of great art comes as one of those shitty silver linings that's totally not worth it that will eventually be bought out and turned into a money machine by the very kinds of people it was directed against and twisted into a way to reinforce the kinds of stereotypes that—
Okay, I'm getting off track here.
For being as young of an art form as it is, there is a bit of dispute over how it got started, and honestly there's probably a bit of truth to most of the theories, except for the one that Al Gore invented it. I'm pretty sure he didn't.
But there are two main theories that sound fairly credible, one starting in the clubs and the other starting in the streets, and ne'er the twain shall meet. Actually, the twain meet all the time, but if I hadn't said it it wouldn't rhyme (I'm on a roll!).
The “streets” origin would be the dozens, a call-and-response battle of wits first recorded by a white psychologist (see: cracker-ass. Dammit, there goes the roll I was on!) in 1939, but which many people (see: cracker-asses) theorize has roots (there it is again) reaching all the way back to 18th Century Africa. If you're not familiar with the dozens, the quickest way to explain it is as an exchange of “yo mama” jokes that goes back and forth until there is a clear winner. If that sounds a lot like a rap battle to you, then congratulations on being able to make a connection.
The second origin story of Hip-Hop basically goes like this: Back in the 70's and early 80's, clubs and house parties and the crowds they attracted were all about the DJ's (or disc jockeys, for the cracker-asses) and their various mixes of music. As a means of hyping up the crowd, an emcee (or MC, or Master of Ceremonies, for the cracker-asses) would be up on stage with the DJ shouting encouragement to dance and have a good time into a microphone, many staples of which endure to this day (“Put your hands in the air,” etc...).
Eventually the two of these things, encouraging a crowd over music and battling with witticisms, colluded together and made Hip-Hop. Most people credit this collusion to Kool Herc, and rightfully so.
So, there you have it, from the very beginning, Hip-Hop was nothing but feel good party music.
Yeah, no. Almost immediately young fans influenced by DJ Kool Herc saw the emerging art form as a vehicle through which to express the sociopolitical realities of black oppression, which gave us people like Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, and furious they were. I cannot express how important it is for you to click on that link, because “The Message” is one of the best things to happen to 20th Century music since Paul met John and joined the Quarrymen.
The 90's would see the meteoric rise of Hip-Hop to an international sensation, to the extent that artists could go from rapping about being broke to rapping about being rich. Yes, those both link to the same song, because nobody charts the course of that trajectory more eloquently than the Notorious B.I.G.
And, aside from a few other noteworthy mentions, that's basically all the history of Hip-Hop you need.
Step Three: Find Your Niche
Gangsta Rap. Conscious Rap. Independent stuff, the second link of which contains a visual history of Hip-Hop in and of itself. Nerdcore, the most oxymoronic portmanteau in the history of music. Whatever the hell you call this unique foray into the awesome.
In the time since its inception, Hip-Hop has become every bit as multifaceted as Rock ever was. This, just like every other art form, has only been helped along at an explosive rate by the advent of the Internet, which is rapidly replacing the aspects of the music industry related to marketing and promotion, cutting out the middle-man bureaucracies and connecting the artists more directly with their target demographics than has ever before been possible. MTV is replaced by YouTube. Radio stations are replaced by Pandora. Record stores are replaced by iTunes. Magazines are replaced by Hip-Hop blogs. Music blogs in general I cannot recommend highly enough, whatever kind of music it is you're into. There's a niche out there for pretty much everything, and your interests will be no exceptions.
But, really, the point is to give Hip-Hop a chance. I absolutely hated Hip-Hop my freshman year of college, but then I heard Atmosphere and the whole landscape shifted beneath me. Here was Slug (the rapper for Atmsophere) making music about insecurities and rejection and the mundanity of his life: no overblown claims about his riches and bitches, no weak double entendres about how nice his car was, just real, gritty, relatable shit. It opened my eyes to the fact that, stripped bare of the music and commercialism, Hip-Hop is poetry, and like all poetry, some of it is really, really good and some of it is skull-numbingly bad. So go out and find the good stuff.
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